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If you haven't noticed, Bioware is taking a bit of a beating in the court of public opinion as of late. Once they could do no wrong in fans' eyes with games like Knights of the Old Republic and the original Mass Effect which were some of the best titles of their generation.

But since their partnership with EA, faith in their brand has steadily dropped as fans see them as being slowly corrupted by the "evil empire" and today far from the company they once were. The most recent controversy has involved the highly anticipated Mass Effect 3. When gamers learned that Bioware was planning on releasing seemingly important DLC on day one, they felt as if an ethical line had been crossed, and they were being taken advantage of as loyal fans.

The situation has escalated further over the weekend, as Bioware's claim that the content wasn't stripped from the title, and was developed as an entirely different storyline after completion of the game, has been apparently proven false. In actuality, the new squad member was already on the disc at launch, and with a few tweaks of code, is available without purchasing the DLC at all. A video exists of the process here. Now Bioware did something not only to upset fans, but it appears that they lied about it as well.

The game is suffering from a second issue, one that doesn't have to do with DLC or any other such extraneous pieces of the game. Though many players enjoy 95% of the title, there is a great deal of frustration with the end of the game. So much so, almost all fan forums devoted to Mass Effect are talking about what a letdown it was as players begin to finish the 30 hour epic.

Without giving too much away, the issue is that after 100 hours of story driven gameplay across three games, the end is split into three rather nonsensical choices, and picking each of them results in largely the same ending which is light on resolution and not what most fans were looking for from their beloved series. One fan aptly described it as if Star Wars was wrapped up with the final moments of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I recently read my fellow contributor Erik Kain's article about this whole day one DLC controversy, and the importance of a brand building loyalty with its consumers. Bioware, despite its "right" to sell content to people who will pay for it, is losing a lot of the goodwill it had previously built up over the years by making great games. Bioware was once a paragon (no pun intended) of everything good about gaming, but in recent years is more often found to be the butt of jokes in light of controversies like these.